Asylum Magazine (Volume 23 No 2) Summer 2016

Introduction – Thirty Years – Progress Or Stagnation?… This issue is devoted to contributions which reflect on the changes (or not) that we have witnessed during the last thirty years; they also consider what is to be done. Included are a range of local views, and we especially welcome interesting appraisals from Italy, Australia and Greece.

During the lifetime of Asylum magazine, the mental health systems of many nations have moved from relying on the big old mental hospitals to relying mainly on a kind of ‘care in the community’.

To some extent this responded to the thoroughgoing critique of mental health care posed by ‘anti-psychiatry’ during the 1960s and 70s. All the same, nowhere in the world is there an official mental health system which will allow that anyone’s very worrying emotional distress and irrationality is largely a result of emotional and psychological trauma, which in turn is usually driven by something pathological in the social relations.

And so, thirty years after the switch to ‘care in the community’, and fifty or sixty years after anti-psychiatry, the official response still has no idea that ‘clients’ could be helped by genuine solidarity and encouragement. There is no coherent official theory of cause or remedy. Never mind: everybody must blindly believe in the failed medical model, and ‘clients’ must be grateful for their medication.

 

 

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Contents

  • Editorial: Thirty Years – Progress or Stagnation?
  • Dr Tim Kendall, National Clinical Director for Mental Health (NHS England), says…
  • Thirty Years of Democratic Psychiatry Down the Drain or… the Struggle Continues?  Phil Hutchinson
  • Thirty Years Speaking Out   Andrew Roberts for the Survivors History Group
  • From Psychiatric Abuse to Psychiatric Neglect? Helen Spandler
  • Educate, Agitate, Organise!   Mick Mckeown
  • Ramblings and Reservations    Tina Coldham
  • ECT and the Fish Pond     William Park
  • Small Acts of Rebellion    Linda Gask
  • Olive’s Story & The Phoenix of Hope   Margaret Turner & Olive Bucknall
  • Soteria Brighton: Origins and activities    Dominic Pearson & Katy Baboulene
  • Trieste Before & After     Daniel Magalhães Goulart
  • Is Psychiatry Really Better Now? A view from Australia      Deidre Oliver
  • Mental Health Care in Greece     Eugenie Georgaca
  • Challenging an Increasingly Maddening World: The timely emergence of Mad Studies   Peter Beresford
  • The Mad Society of Canada (MADSoC)
  • Speaking Out Against Psychiatry     Cheryl Prax
  • News and Findings

 

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